


unreliable landmarks

by somethingdifferent



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Gen, References to Abuse, References to Drugs, Swearing, and it's not nice and happy it's cold and mean, god i dont even know anymore, i just find him really fascinating., i need like ten thousand drinks to handle this show, invented backstory because why not, this is not an excuse in any way for ward's double-agentness, yeah there is skyeward but it is super duper brief
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-11
Updated: 2014-04-11
Packaged: 2018-01-18 22:57:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1445926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somethingdifferent/pseuds/somethingdifferent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every <strike>hero</strike> villain needs an origin story; <em>This is a story of three brothers. That's how it would start.</em></p>
<p>[grant ward & oc's; backstory au]</p>
            </blockquote>





	unreliable landmarks

> _Imagine that the world is made out of love. Now imagine that it isn’t. Imagine a story where everything goes wrong, where everyone has their back against the wall, where everyone is in pain and acting selfishly because if they don’t, they’ll die. Imagine a story, not of good against evil, but of need against need against need, where everyone is at cross-purposes and everyone is to blame. _
> 
> "The Definitive Version," Richard Siken

 

 

 

 

 

There's a story, which is how these things always start, isn't it? There's a knight and a dragon and someone in distress (usually a princess, but it can be a boy too, like someone with a wing for a shoulder). There's a happy ever after, and a woman dancing in red hot shoes until she drops dead like a stone. Sometimes there are brothers, usually ones that lay down their lives for the others.

Grant does not remember a time when his brother wasn't Crow. He knows there was a name before that, there must have been, even if it is lost somewhere in the wreckage of the attic, useless and gutted in the bottom of a well.

This isn't a fairy tale. He only realizes this later. This is a story of three brothers. That's how it would start.

There are three brothers, the first, the second, the third. There's a boy at the bottom of a well. There's a boy somewhere in Boston, with scars like the stripes of a candy cane on his back. There's a boy walking away from his house. He is split in two, like an atom, and he loves one and hates the other ( _or is it loves both and hates himself; the audience never knows_ ), and he is walking out of the door on his 18th birthday with some vague promise of being recruited into the army. It isn't the army, but Grant doesn't know that right now.

He leaves home the moment he turns 18. Grant knows this because he waited until the exact date, until the exact time on the analog clock in the kitchen, 8:14 in the morning. He's young. The poetry of the thing seems more important than the logistics.

Grant looks back at the house he's just walked out of, the grotesque structure settled like some terrible beast in the middle of the neighborhood, vines overgrown along the bricks and broken shingles decorating the roof. It's August. The sun burns his back like a hot kettle fresh off the stove.

 

 

 

 

- 

 

 

 

 

_Once upon a time,_ says his mother. _Once upon a time, there was a king and a queen and three beautiful sons. There was a beautiful castle, overgrown with vines, but that only added to the effect. There was a king somewhere in Boston, please stop asking me. There were two brothers, named Henry and Grant, and there was another little boy named Crow, and he was their brother too. There was a boy named Crow with black wings that covered the sun and sharp, glittering teeth in his feathery head. There is a story, and no one is happy, and all the birds are dead._

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

He's four the first time Crow hits him, and the shock of it stops him from doing anything in return. Dad has been gone for a little over a year, taking with him all of Grant's memories of his appearance. He'll try, later, to recall something about the way his father looked, the curl of his lip, the shine of his black hair, but to no avail.

Crow is standing over him, laughing at the way his younger brother folds slowly to the ground. He's seven, taller and bigger, and he crouches on the ground to look Grant directly in the eye.

"Get up."

Grant stands shakily. Crow leans in close, the fluorescent lights overhead glinting off his wide, dark pupils. His father's eyes were the same color. That he'll remember. Black and pitiless eyes in his head.

"Don't take my stuff," he mutters against Grant's temple, his small hand clenched tight around the collar of his shirt. "It's _my_ truck, not yours. Stupid."

Grant sniffles, wiping his hand against his dripping nose as he watches his brother stride away. Brothers are mean, he decides. He's not excited about the one in the next room over.

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

The glasses, he remembers. The blue and white glasses lined up like dominoes in shelves he can't reach. Henry is nearly four the first time he stands up on the counter and pulls one of them from the cabinets, dropping it back onto the hardwood floors and listening to it shatter. He's alone, or might as well be, since Grant and Crow are both at school and Mom is passed out on the couch upstairs. Grant comes home to his little brother, bare-chested and screeching, sitting on the floor, surrounded by broken glass.

Henry holds out his hands, palms up like a prayer, and wails at the bits of glass stuck all over his skin. Grant finds the vacuum in the coat closet and sets about cleaning up the mess around Henry, listening to the broken pieces whir in the machine. He climbs up onto the counter and retrieves Mom's first aid kit from the medicine cabinet. It's bulky, and he struggles with it as he drops back onto the floor.

"Shh," he coos to Henry, his hand fluttering uselessly around his brother's mouth in an attempt to stop the little sniffling noises he's making. "I'm gonna get all of it out." He can vaguely remember Mom saying something like that when he got a splinter last year. He was only a first grader then, and he cried from the pain radiating from his pointer finger. Big kids wouldn't cry, but Henry's still little.

Grant plucks the pieces of glass from his hands, flinching every time Henry lets out an audible whimper and depositing the tiny shards into a paper towel. By the time he's finished with one hand, Henry's tiny palm is splattered with a thin layer of blood.

"Almost done," he reassures him, picking up the tweezers again and readying them clumsily against Henry's left hand.

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

(His grandparents are all dead long before he's born. He lies to Skye about that one. He lies to a lot of people about a lot of things.)

They're doing family trees when he's in fifth grade. Henry has just started school, and Grant walks him to and from the bus stop with the big green construction paper in his hand, already dreading the moment that he has to ask Mom about it. He would make something up, but that would be cheating. Crow cheats all the time now that he's in junior high. He doesn't even try to hide it.

Grant unlocks the door to the house with a steady hand. He's stopped trying to convince his mother to start trimming the hedges, mowing the lawn. The grass in the front yard is either dead or dying, and the vines have practically swallowed the house whole. The sidewalk is split in two where the roots of a tree break through the pavement.

"Where's Dad?" Grant is crouching near the sofa, his head rested on the cushion near his mother's arm.

"What?" she mumbles into her blanket, opening her eyes blearily and staring at her son as if wondering how he got there.

"I'm doing a project for school." He fidgets in his sweater, the sleeves overlarge and covering his hands. Crow's hand-me-downs. Always more than he has the capacity to fill. Grant wears his brother's clothes and is struck with the thought that he is woefully insufficient. "I need to know Dad's name and grandma and grandpa's and stuff. Do you got any brothers or sisters?"

"Oh, darling," Mom mutters, lifting her head up from the couch. Her hand reaches out, like some unfamiliar creature, and twists itself against his face, tugging tight against his jaw. "Crow, dearest. Fuck off." Her head drops back onto the blanket with a muffled thud.

Grant spends the night making up names. By the next day, he has two aunts, one living grandmother, and a father who died in the war. Killed in action. He gets lost in it, the inventing and categorizing of history, countless meaningless names and dates that have never and never will exist.

_If only_ , he thinks, pasting the leaves to the paper greener than overgrown weeds.

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

The well is behind the house, falling apart like everything else no one has time to keep. Grant has always been careful to keep Henry out of the way of the unstable structures littering the property, even after he knew not to open up the top of the well and climb in.

Grant is at some after school activity when Crow drags Henry into the well. He won't remember what it was, later. He won't remember much of anything about it, except for the sound of his brother screaming, and the sound of his brother laughing, and the sound of his blood in his throat, and the feel of the rope tearing against his palms as Henry clings to the beaten down stone.

Henry is crying against the outside wall of the well when Grant runs into the house, racing upstairs to find blankets, anything, before Crow comes back from the drug store, cigarettes and lighter fluid in hand, and finds Henry exactly where he shouldn't be.

"Grant." His mother's hand darts out like a snake and tightens against his upper arm, the skin turning red around her fingers. Her eyes are red, the veins around her black pupils bright and engorged with blood. "Grant, baby, come here." She leans in close, her charcoal breath ghosting across his face. "I love you, pumpkin."

He shoves her hands away, her pale, pale hands the color of dead birds in the park. "Get away from me," he hears someone, something, saying in his voice. "Get the fuck away from me."

She stumbles back, her thin limbs collapsing as she folds to the hardwood floor. "Grant, baby," she wails, her hands reaching as he runs out of her grasp, the blankets heavy as a body in his arms.

Crow saunters back from the store after dinner, when the sky has turned black, but he doesn't have time to ask about why the fuck Henry is out of the well before Grant has his closed fist knocked against his brother's jaw, blood spilling onto the pavement like pieces of glass.

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

He's sitting outside of the principal's office, bleeding from the mouth, his knuckles torn to shreds.

"Mr. Ward?" The pretty, blonde secretary spins in her chair and waves him over. "He's ready for you now."

Grant stands, his legs carrying him uncertainly to the glass doors of the office. As he passes him through the narrow frame, Julian Mitchell scowls, his hand held up to his gushing nose.

"Fucking retard," he spits before the blonde woman leads him away, scolding him in that too-high, thin little voice.

"Grant?" Mr. O'Shaughnessy gestures for Grant to sit in the chair across from his desk. He obliges, tapping his foot against the ground and looking blankly up. O'Shaughnessy frowns in that way that means he wants to look concerned, but wants to go home more. "Now, this is your first year in high school, so I'd really like to cut you some slack. Could you tell me what happened with Mr. Mitchell?"

"I hit him," he replies easily, his voice unwavering and low. "He started bleeding."

"Why did you do that?"

"He did it first."

The principal furrows his brow, seemingly confused. "What? Hit you? There's a girl in your class who said--"

"No," Grant says, allowing his mouth to widen, bare his teeth in some facsimile of a smile. "Made me bleed."

When he gets home again, his punishment little more than a slap on the wrist, he cuts his too-long hair with Crow's scissors. Grant watches his black hair swirling down the sink, smiling at the sight. He's never been Samson. He knows that now.

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

There are days spent at home, days in the summer like the waves of heat over blacktop, days where Crow goes to the city to get high, comes home with cigarette burns on his neck, one, two, three. His teenage years pass in a succession of days like the silent montages of films watched in a darkened theater.

Grant fights. Boys in the neighborhood mostly, other boys with no father, Crow when he tries to hit Henry for old times' sake, a girl once who said she could take it and wanted to try.

"I'm Shelly," she tells him when he helps her up from the ground, wiping her hand across her mouth, skin coming away red and sticky with blood. She flips her dark hair over her shoulder, glances up at him with her eyes gleaming black and bloodshot. Like his mother, he doesn't let himself think. "You're Grant?"

He lets his hand linger against the inside of her wrist as he pulls away, smiles at the fascination in her eyes. "What's it to you?"

"Your brother, Crow." Her mouth is sharp and curved, like the bow of a knife. "My sister used to go with him. He said his little brother could knock anyone out. I wanted to see for myself."

Grant shrugs, rolling his shoulder. Shelly is breathing deep and heavy in front of him, sweat glittering on her collarbone. Grant, abruptly, terribly, wants to know the taste of it on her dark skin. "Crow's full of shit."

"About some things." She steps closer to him, looking up at him from underneath her thick eyelashes. "Wanna go again?"

(Every time he kisses a girl after that, even when his mouth is chaste and closed, gentlemanly, proper, he can still taste the phantom blood of Shelly Fleming in his mouth; after Shelly, he always tastes like death and horror and the insides of an abandoned warehouse with coke spread over her gums and bullets in the back of her head.

Skye kisses him, and he can still feel someone else's blood singing in the back of his throat, between his teeth.)

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

He leaves, when he's 18. At the exact moment, because Grant feels like it should _mean_ something, those days should add up to some sort of pay-off. Crow is in Boston, has been since he turned 18 a few years back, and Henry will be fine enough at home. Mom's long since stopped being sober enough to hit and bite.

"Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Divison," the woman called Agent Hill tells him with her voice flat, eyes glittering in the fluorescent lights. "Do you know what that is?"

He works it out in his head, briefly. "Wait, does that spell 'S.H.I.E.L.D.?' All that mumbo-jumbo, just to make the acronym cooler?"

She ignores him, continuing, "The army. We're like the army." She points to the file in front of him, the top flap closed and decorated with what looks like a shitty rendition of an eagle. "Your record is impressive, to say the least. Interesting, the way you've handled things. We think you'd be at home in our operations academy."

"Operations? What is that, like--"

"You'd be using your talents for a lot of good work. We'd refine your abilities, find you a place in our organization, and maximize your potential which, to be frank, is wasted in Massachusetts. It's wasted, Mr. Ward, on petty thugs and your older brother. What is his name?" She flips open the file, turning the pages so that only she can see what's there. "Crow."

Grant leans forward, feeling something bubbling up in the back of his throat. "That's not his name," he hisses.

Hill's eyes flash, and she closes the file again. "Oh really? Then enlighten me, Mr. Ward. What is his name?"

Grant tightens his jaw, lowering his gaze. "What do you want me to do?"

"Right now? I'd like you to accept my offer. Later? We'll see." She allows a small smile to grace her face, flitting across her features briefly before she holds out her hand.

He hesitates, but after a pause, takes it in his own.

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

"Where is Henry?"

His mother looks up from the TV, remote control held loosely in her hand, and she grins.

"Crow," she says, "you came back!"

"I'm not Crow."

She furrows her brow, her jaw slack with confusion and disinterest. Her eyes are red and shot with blood, matching her poorly painted nail polish, little crimson blobs all over her hands. "Not Crow?" she asks, sniffling a little bit. Like a child.

Grant turns away, disgusted, as she sinks back onto the couch, her eyes already glazing over. He'd forgotten, in his years in the academy, what desperation looks like. How it breeds in every corner of their house, the neighborhood, the motherless, fatherless children in the back alleys of Boston. He'd forgotten.

"Grant?" He glances up, at the figure looming in the doorway, small and thin. Henry steps into the broken light.

"Henry," he says, relieved suddenly of some burden he didn't realize he was carrying. He'd had his doubts, leaving home, but Henry is surviving. He's fine.

Henry's mouth curves, his lips pulled back to reveal his sharp, gleaming teeth. "What the fuck are you doing here?"

Grant flinches as if his brother had slapped him. "Henry, I'm here to see you."

"You haven't been around in years, Grant." Henry steps closer, and Grant can see suddenly the hollow lines of his cheekbones, how much taller he's gotten. He looks like a dying man. "A check every month, and that's supposed to mean something to me? You left."

"I kept you and Mom fed," Grant hurls out defensively. "I protected you. I protected you from Crow, from those hopheads in the city--"

"Oh, you mean your old gang? Crow's friends?" Henry laughs, the sound like shattered glass. "You didn't protect me from jack shit, Grant."

"You've been involved in that?" Grant feels suddenly like a kid again, in Crow's old clothes. He feels small and ugly and mean and unbearably inadequate.

Henry smirks, and he looks so young, he's still only a child, Grant thinks, even if he's nearly 18 himself. "Old habits die hard, brother. Now get out of my fucking house." Henry raises his arm, pointing coolly to the door.

"Crow?" his mother is calling to him from the couch. "Crow, baby, don't leave me alone with him again."

Grant steps out of the door, knocking into his brother, now just another unfamiliar body. Back into the glaring sun.

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

His supervising officer is nice enough. He tells stories, most of them too vivid and detailed to be true, but Grant humors him and listens. Being an agent is fine enough, if not the easiest career path in the world. It reminds him of summer, knocking boys from the neighborhood into the dust, waiting for Crow to get back from the drug store with another pack of smokes, watching Henry reading books on the cover of the well out back, listening to Mom snoring upstairs while the TV plays repeats of Jerry Springer.

Garrett downs another shot and pushes Grant's glass closer to him. "Jesus, you're a quiet one. How the hell are you, kid?" Garrett has a habit of calling all younger agents 'kid,' probably in some vague attempt to endear himself as a father-figure. Grant sees through that, has since the principal in high school called him into the office with so much concern in his voice and nothing in his eyes.

Grant smiles momentarily, takes a sip from his drink. "Just fine."

"Look," Garrett says, always so _understanding_ , "I know it was a hard op, but something's been bothering you. I don't know what it is, but I can guess pretty well."

Grant turns in his chair, letting something darken his eyes before he relaxes again into a neutral expression. "You read my file," he says flatly. It isn't a question, and Garrett doesn't take it as one.

He nods, seeming to think hard about something. "Your brother, it's a shame. You worked so hard to keep him out of that life, and he falls into it when you dare to have a life of your own. Damn shame."

"Just say what you're going to say, Garrett, I'm not in the mood for riddles."

Garrett lowers his voice, and yes, this is what he'd been building up to. Grant can see it now, in the hungry gleam in his pale, pale eyes. "I'm part of an organization within S.H.I.E.L.D., smaller, more elite. Our primary goal is to establish a new order, a better order, for the world. People are disorganized, all little bundles of chaos knocking each other into the dirt and taking what they will without a thought for civilized behavior. Your brothers, both of them, are victims of that mentality." Garrett stands up, leaving a folded bill under his glass, and pulls on his jacket. "I'd like you to consider my offer, Ward. You'll have a chance, a really good one, to actual instill some change. For your mother. For Henry. Think about it," he calls over his shoulder as he leaves.

Grant faces forward again, not paying attention as Garrett slips out of the bar. Watches his reflection in the rusted mirror. The last time he'd tracked down Henry had yielded the same results as before, with nothing but underground fights and cocaine and death and death and death on the other side.

Chaos, he thinks, nothing but isolated and destructive events crashing into each other and starting fires. Grant finishes his drink and picks up the card that Garrett left, with the symbol in black ink on the back.

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

"Grant," Crow is saying, his calloused hands reaching out to grip his jacket. "Grant, I haven't seen you in ages!"

"Be quiet," Grant hisses, clamping his hand over his brother's mouth. "Shut the fuck up, or you'll blow everything."

Crow practically giggles, but quiets down. It figures that he would stumble on a shadowy government operation, it just figures that even now Crow could ruin everything for him. Grant ducks out from behind the dumpster, into the target's line of sight. He dispatches the other man easily enough, just the way Garrett taught him, and turns back to see an empty space where his brother should be.

Grant catches up with Crow a block over, stumbling away, still laughing. The sound reverberates off the empty roads. It's late. No one is out except for the Ward brothers.

"What the fuck are you doing?" Grant spits out, holding his older brother by the collar. Crow has gotten thinner since he left home, his black eyes sunk into his skull and fingers as long and thin as spider legs. And to think Grant was ever afraid of him.

"I had a girl," Crow tells him, still grinning stupidly at nothing and no one. "She kicked me out. What are you doing back in Boston? I heard from Jack you got some big job with the government or whatever."

"Go home, Crow," Grant tells him, shoving him away.

"You hate me." He's digging into his pockets, pulling out one lone cigarette and a matchbook. He strikes the match against the back of his hand, watching it flare into life. "You always hated me."

"You hit me," Grant states as neutrally as possible, forcing the anger clawing its way to his mouth back down his throat. "You hit me and Henry and I couldn't do anything about it until I learned to fight back. And you did it for no fucking reason at all."

"No fucking reason at all?" Crow says, his voice mocking. "You don't remember what it was like, just that bitch and dad. Just her and dad and me and you. You fucking had it easy with me, some kid wailing on you. Try it when it's just you and her and him because his other son's too little to be a target, and he's got his fucking wrench and his fucking belt and his fucking hands. You had it easy, kid. You had it so fucking easy."

Suddenly, Grant feels his fingers around his brother's throat, watches Crow choking underneath his hand. He looks at his arm dispassionately, as if it were something other than he is.

Crow is still smiling when Grant lets him go again.

"Brother," he laughs, though it's more of a cough. "Oh, you are everything I always wanted to be."

"What is your name?" Grant leans over his brother's figure, kneeled on the ground like a sinner in church. Like a sinner, he thinks, like a sinner hanging in a tree. "It's not Crow, it never has been, what is your fucking name?"

Crow looks up, his eyes glittering like burnt coins in the street lights. "What makes you think I know?" Crow spits on the ground, but it comes out bloody. He smiles again at Grant, his teeth red. "You had it easy, brother. You had it so fucking easy."

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

Garrett has an assignment for him, he says, for HYDRA.

"You'll be on a team," he says quietly, glancing around the room over the top of his glass. "With Agent Coulson and the Cavalry."

"Coulson? Coulson is dead."

"Not anymore, man. Not anymore." Garrett leans in closer, gesturing for Grant to do the same. He does so, reluctantly. "Look, this is deep undercover, and you're not exactly the most likable person around. I can train you, but you'll be mostly on your own for this one. Can I count on you to handle this?"

Grant flicks through the possibilities in his head, already trying to create something from the mess Garrett is describing. This is what you do. You create order in chaos, no matter how impossible it seems.

Grant nods, pushing thoughts of his brothers to the back of his head, Crow on some street in Boston, Henry in a fight with another fatherless child. "I can handle this," he says evenly. "What do you need me to do?"

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

Skye is an unknown variable, but Grant handles her easily enough. He can always handle things, even the unknowns. She's small, pretty, exactly the type of girl he would be interested in in any other circumstance. The kind of girl Crow would chew up and spit out, and Grant feels a white-hot flash of anger mixed with something else he can't name when he considers that.

She's punching into his hands, joking, whining about something or another. He tells her about Crow, his fucking sob story. Abusive brother, of course. Classic over-reveal, just the way Garrett taught him.

He watches the way something flashes over her face before she returns to her standard neutral expression, more determined than before. Pity, he thinks first, then reassesses, realizing something. Not pity. Sorrow. For a moment, so brief he doesn't know if it actually happens, he doesn't want to do what he knows he has to. Not to this girl caught in the middle of a storm bigger than anything she could imagine.

He likes her, he knows this, he likes her fire, as raw and unrefined as it is. He tilts his head to the side, considering her before him, considered the plane around them and the little people buzzing through it, knocking into each other carelessly and without remorse. It'll all be gone before the year is out, and replaced with something better, more ordered. For his mother. For Henry.

He smiles at Skye, allowing something genuine to flit into his eyes before he tamps it down again, never to resurface. A waste, he thinks, a little sadly.

A complete and utter waste.

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
